Trouble the Water
by Empatheia
Summary: -Sybil System- She is its heart, and it is her cage.


_**Trouble the Water**_

She'd had another name once.

Sometimes, when the load on the system is relatively light, she tries to remember what it was. It seems an ancient thing, now, a worn row of hieroglyphics she can only squint at through the dust. Logically she knows that it has only been perhaps forty years since someone had last called her by it; the System can tell her the time and date whenever she feels like asking, but the only answers it can give her are meaningless to her. Knowing the distance between her soul and her name will not help her remember what it was.

Now they call her Sybil, if they bother to call her at all. They look at her and see a cold-eyed thing, a mythical and grotesque parody of humanity, aimlessly tracing an endless ouroboros path through her fishbowl forest of wires and electrodes and sensors. She is only the face of the System to them, a pleasing metaphor to cloak an ugly grey thing. Most of them have forgotten that while she is the System's heart, the System is her cage, and that despite their symbiosis they are bitter enemies, locked in a changeless war with no goal to be won.

They found her when she was a still a child, in the eyes of most civilized societies: thirteen, waifish and wrong, a _thing_ that had somehow slipped off the rails of plodding human evolution into a wilderness of nightmares. Her black eyes were larger than they should have been in her otherwise normal elfin face, alien and deep, and they saw more than any human eyes ever could. Souls were bare and obvious things to her, minds easier than open books. Though it was not _colour_ she saw when she looked at people's innards, not quite, she was too young to have other words for it, and so she used what she had. There were similarities in the the way the differences between "shades" could be measured on many axes. It was close enough to make herself understood.

She kept nothing to herself. She had yet to learn the wisdom of silence.

By the time they found her, she was alone in the woods, scraping life from the roots and suburb garbage bins; abandoned by her family when their terror grew too savage to bear. They would have killed her if they believed they could have, she knows. She had no magic to defend herself from such ordinary things as knives. Of course they had not known that, only knew that she could see them coming, had seen through their glass skins to the ugliness inside before they even knew it was there. Irrationally, they had felt as though she had _created_ monsters inside them, corrupting them like a poisoned thing rather than simply pulling the curtains away from their own cannibal souls.

When the system came for her, it took no chances, left no room for argument. While she slept, its teeth surrounded a little utility shack a stone's throw into the trees; she'd found some small shelter there when winter's teeth sharpened. Fifty soldiers stood in a ring, several paces apart. They gassed the entire area and waited until they heard her fall.

She woke up in the first of what would be a long line of fishbowls. This one was very nearly literal, a high glass dome in the middle of a white room so large it was difficult to regain perspective. Her size fluctuated, her borders unstable, like Alice in the room with its table, except there were no doors, even tiny ones. There was nothing but her and the glass and the seamless walls. No food, no toys or books to keep her occupied. Most pointedly, she suspected, nothing she could use to harm herself or anyone else. The dome was unbreakable, not really glass but rather a bomb-shelter facsimile of it, much harder and crueler. They hadn't even left her any clothes, presumably to avoid the chance of her strangling herself.

When they spoke to her, it was through an invisible speaker system. Their voices hovered unnervingly close to her ears on both sides, buzzing and prodding at her mind. When she remained silent - out of curiosity more than anything else, just to see what they would do - they left her alone for a stretch of time that seemed absurdly long with nothing to measure it against. Even now she has no real idea how long she stayed alone and silent in the borderless white hell they'd made for her, and has never bothered to ask.

They were more persistent on their return, questioning her with maddeningly calm voices for hours on end, the series of questions going around in long cold circles; she could not block them out, but did refuse to answer.

Then another long stretch of silence. It got much worse when it ended this time. They had wanted to do this the easier way, they told her, but if they could not ask her mind they would have to resort to "surer methods." She hadn't know what they meant, and hadn't been able to see their auras when they said it, and so she had not known how to prepare. She was afraid, but not afraid enough to brace.

The second fishbowl was full of water, or something made to look like it, but it hurt. _Everything_ hurt. Pain became a thing much like time, immeasurable and ubiquitous. It breathed through her, became a whiteness in her blood, a cold snap in the marrow of her bones. When it ended, its absence left her world so hollow she thought she must have died.

The voices assured her she had not: it was just that they had learned as much as they could this way. They could go no further without answers from her subjective mind. It was not mercy. They had none.

Stumbling and reeling in the new void where the pain had been, desperate for something to fill it, Sybil used the first thing she could find: her own voice. She answered them. When they ran out of questions, she answered the ones they hadn't known to ask. And by the time she realized that she was giving herself away, the story of her soul that was the thread that held her together, they had a firm grip and she could not take it back.

The third fishbowl lasted for five years. When they let her out of it, it was to bring her to the fourth, the second-last, the shining heart of the brand new prototype System they had built for and around her. It sank its tendrils into her skin and became her, and at the same time strangled her, sucked her dry until she was only a shrunken template for it to build its new stolen magic on.

The arrays of tests they put their new saviour through were rigorous, and cruel, and on occasion bloody. The first time they tested Dominator's lethal setting is a memory she still holds and treasures: either as an unasked-for kindness or a misplaced cruelty, the test subject they brought in was her father.

He fought and kicked and bellowed as much as he could under the influence of the heavy spread of drugs in his blood, but he stopped the moment he caught sight of her, met her eyes through the thick not-glass plating of her fishbowl and gaped. She wondered what he saw. Was she still the child he'd raised, however unwillingly, through the first unhappy years of her life? Was she the nightmare he'd fled on stumbling feet in the dark on that last night? Or both, something to inspire in him a queasy combination of instinctual love and equally instinctual loathing? She could not guess from his face, which was a blank rictus of shock. Sybil had never been good at reading faces anyway.

He stayed silent throughout the remainder of the test, mouth hanging open in a silent, helpless howl as the System laid the lattice of her borrowed alien sight over him. She felt it add up the maelstrom inside him, organize it, solve for _y_ and name the chaotic result by its corresponding pseudo-colour. She felt it rank the total against the whole and convert it into the uncomplicated statement of a Criminal Coefficient. She felt the shift when the System judged her father unworthy. She felt the pressure of the trigger and the agony of the buildup and the sweet, desperate thunder of release, she felt him die, she watched his ugly dented soul curl up and fade into nothing. Sybil learned what it felt like to be avenged. For a moment she thought she might have glimpsed happiness, that most elusive myth.

The world became easier after that. The System was still her cage, but it was also her home now, and she had found a thin, rocky peninsula of common ground whereon she could live in uneasy harmony with it. Every time it took vengeance on the world for her - though that was not at all what it thought it was doing - she thanked it. It never responded, but she felt its rage, the mechanical mirror of her own despite its foreign source, and thought it almost a kind of kindred spirit. The border demarcating the divide between Sybil and the System began to thin and blur.

Then came the day they moved her to the final fishbowl, a great gnarled seed at the root of a high black tower. As usual, they had not told her what to expect, so she had resigned herself to whatever the worst might be.

In the transport pod - fishbowl four-point-five - she felt naked and unbearably alone despite the voices of the four handlers in the truck with her. The System had become her, but she had become the System too, and being disconnected from it was like having the greater part of her soul torn away. She huddled in the tank with her knees drawn to her naked, flat chest and waited in the forlorn hope that they would let her be whole again soon.

The fifth and last fishbowl was entirely unlike the others. It was vast, for one, an entire globe of not-water just for her. Its walls and floors were festooned with wires and tendrils like climbing vines and trailing wisteria, with more nubs at the bottom that promised to grow into an entire artificial forest. Those gardens would take hold of her, so she would never be able to hide from their roots, but outside eyes would not always find her, not unless she wanted them to. It was a palace, a beautiful gilded palace with fortress walls to keep her safe. She nearly clawed her way out of the holding tank to get to it, black eyes wide and yearning.

The caretakers made joking comments behind her, _I think she likes it_, but she ignored them as she always did, pressing her fingers to the glass and crying voicelessly for the roots to come bind her, for that broad transparent sky and deep currents, for _home_ and her own soul.

The moment they connected her to the operational model of the System...

On the days when she falters in her determination to find and , it is because of that memory. She is miserable now, but she was happy once, for that one moment of glory and ascendance she had never touched again since, and the insidious hope that she might someday find that one more time binds her harshly to the world she hates.

Her caretakers had tried to explain God to her many times, both those who believed and those who did not but thought it an important philosophical exercise for her. She had never understood, until the moment the uplink locked in and her consciousness merged with the true System. A thousand eyes opened within her at once, a thousand ears, her sense of space destroyed in favour of feeling herself everywhere at once, embodied in the Drones and in the System and in herself all together. She understood God then. She _was_ God.

As they implemented the System and extended its arms over the country, so she grew and spread and came closer and closer to a nebulous goal she could only think of as "wholeness," a state where nothing in the world as she knew it existed outside of her god-self. She was the one in the cage now, but when she reached that singularity, the world would turn itself inside out and her little fishbowl would be the only free place left, its curving walls a cage for everything outside of it.

So when they reached the conclusion of the expansion projects, it came as a surprise to her. She had not been told that the System's jurisdiction would stop at the borders of this tiny island nation the swarm around her thought of as home. They had dreamed out loud of a _world_ under her firm, ordered reign, and she had taken that for intention rather than overblown ambition.

She was God and she ruled this small world given to her now, but she wanted the _whole_ world, the world of humanity, and she wanted that world to be _inside_ her rather than some external thing she could never truly touch. If that was not possible... the hunger that gnawed at her would only grow, she knew, as it was growing now, until eventually there would be nothing left of her but her bones and that same awful hunger gnawing at her remains forever, more immortal even than her.

Claustrophobia descended on her. The fishbowl which had seemed so vast at first warped and shrank around her. Her eyes could show her thousands up thousands of miles of streets and crossroads and empty neon-lit spaces, but she could not reach them, only see them, and she could not breathe that air, only the not-water, and she was suffocating now, drowning, vast and bloated and _trapped_, a caged leviathan, the most powerful being in existence and also the most powerless. She could hardly breathe for screaming.

And then she found the first of the apostles.

Her first sight of that astounding soul was a revelation. Sybil let the System take over everything but this, separated it from the soul so that it would be Sybil's alone, then followed it like a starving ghost through the corridors and halls of its world for months, tireless and fascinated.

The apostle was young, about the same age she had been when they'd come for her. Under the scrutiny of daylight she was obedient, a talented art student, a dutiful daughter to her weary working-class parents. She radiated a field of peace that made people who came close enough smile with relief even if they didn't realize why they felt it. She was an angel. Perfect. The very picture of everything humanity wanted in a little girl.

At night she was everything _Sybil_ wanted, everything she had not known she yearned to find. The girl-thing slipped out through the windows of her home like a warm wind, sleepless and sharp-eyed, a black-eyed huntress in search of prey. When she found it, she was not cruel, and she did not attempt to force art where there was none. She only savoured the victory itself, head tilted back as the blood began to flow, exalted by her proximity to the eternal in the last breathless moment before the end. Her aura was black as night, and as clear: Sybil almost thought she could see the stars through the huntress' ribs. A new colour, entirely new, breathtaking in the most literal of ways.

Now that she knew people this beautiful could exist, she went looking for them, and to her great delight, found them: almost a hundred of them, each unique and unspeakably precious to her. Most of them had some variant of the original huntress' clear night-sky aura, but there were others whose auras were deep colours like wine, and still others whose auras were white as pain, so pure and bright they hurt to look at and were yet utterly opaque. The System was baffled by all of them; it calculated its coefficients based on the darkness and muddiness of auras, as they were almost always paralleled, interchangeable; but the apostles were one without the other, anomalies for whom it had no equations.

Sybil slowly, carefully taught it to evaluate them by whichever attribute it classed as "better," so that the night-skies and wine-darks were ranked by clearness and the pain-brights by paleness, and the result was better than she could have hoped.

The anti-viral programs built into the System were mystified by her impossible children, and because of its own labyrinthine shape it could not see what she had done to it to protect them, and so it was forced to hunt them down without the help of its own eyes. She had hoped that might be the end of it, but it proved to have learned more craftiness from her than she'd thought: it made itself a simulacrum of a human body, an android with a photocopied personality, and had it appointed head of the Public Security Bureau. From there, it attempted to track and eradicate her beautiful plague with pathetic human eyes and ordinary cameras. Sometimes, miraculously, it was successful, to her great displeasure. She felt the loss of her apostles keenly, the only things outside herself she had ever truly valued.

But she could do nothing more than what she already had, and chafed until she realized that they were even more valuable than she had thought. They began to bring unintended benefit: their existence alone destabilized the structure of society, as it was built on a System that could not understand them. It had managed to keep everything on an even keel for a long time through dint of sheer desperate effort, but she knew how to be patient. She had learned. There would always be apostles, and they would be faithful to her whether they knew it or not, because they belonged to her in a way no mind or machine could begin to quantify. They were pious devotees to their god, no matter what name they had given it or failed to give it; always the same god, despite the occasional veneer of virtue and selflessness. All priestesses of the same cold religion. All and always worshipping her.

And now one of them has heard her voice and is coming for her. He looked into her Eyes the first time and saw/i her, as none had ever done before, and kept looking, and now at long last he is coming. The bringer of light, spreading the twin plagues of truth and chaos. Coming to kill the System. Coming to kill her.

_I'm down here,_ she whispers through the wires and conductive spaces and tense shadows of her tower prison-home, trying to find the path to his ears, and through them the path to his heart. _Come find me. Come give me peace, if you can._

Sybil calls for her chariot and waits for the light to find her.


End file.
